ALBA - Unofficial Forum

I have dedicated the summer to trying to persuade the SNP that it is in trouble and needs a substantial rebuild. For me it is obvious what ‘rebuild’ means, but I know that not everyone knows how a modern, effective, campaigning political party is structured. What follows is a sketch of that.

Sorry this is quite long but there’s a lot to cover. It may look like this is massive but it’s not quite as involved as it looks. At least three quarters of this is just effective recruitment. Some of it is straightforward if the best candidates can be persuaded (like the policy expertise). Some is looking for more specialist skills which might require a headhunter (for me, particularly the political strategist roles).

Equally, sorry it is so short and only whips over the key points. This might look like a wish list, but in the end this is just a team of Spads in the leaders’ office paid for publicly and about 15 people in SNP HQ. I know the party is running out of money, but this is where it needs to get to. With more space I would explain how to phase the party’s way there if there is no money.

I’ll break this into the various functions concerned and lead out with party reform, not because it is where I would start but because it is probably what many readers are most familiar with. I’m just trying to explain that a rapid, root-and-branch rebuild is not as hard as you think and can be achieved a lot faster than you might imagine.

In a minute I’m going to argue that a fundamental problem for the SNP is its failure to maintain an effective data-gathering presence in communities. It is an example of why, unless the overall party is healthy, the other problems are harder to solve. So sort the party.

The party really needs good public attitude data to find out why a segment of SNP voters have walked away from it and then it needs good canvas data to find out where they are. If you don’t know where they are, you’re left broadcasting blindly into the void and hoping your target audience hears. But you can’t find them without an active membership gathering local data. And you can’t get a local membership motivated and active if you’ve treated them badly.

So yes, congratulations SNP leadership(s), you successfully gathered all power in the party and held it tight in your own hands so no-one can challenge you or question you or voice any dissent. Unfortunately you did so by treating your membership contemptuously and leaving them with nothing valuable to contribute, other than to send out leaflets on demand for various presidential-style campaigns and affirm the leadership’s pre-made decisions at conference.

Which is why no-one is going to party meetings any more. The centralisation is also why SNP policy is such a mess. If the leadership is going to keep writing policy on the back of a fag packet and not expose it to scrutiny and debate, that’s what happens. The SNP membership is entirely cut-out of serious policymaking and if they try to do it on their own, the leadership just ignores it anyway.

There are two things that need to be done, both involving the restoration of party democracy. First, local branches need to be empowered not controlled. They need to be trained seriously (and respectfully) in whatever overarching strategy the party develops. Crucially, they then need to be allowed the autonomy and freedom to enact that strategy locally so they are partners, not subjects.

Hopefully that starts to give party activists a reason to participate again – and collect local data. The second thing addresses policy and the character of the party overall. The SNP should return to the model of a separate policy development process. The party used to have quarterly National Assemblies with one delegate per constituency and that did the really detailed policy development work, with the twice-yearly National Council (delegate from every branch) shaping the big picture so that an annual party conference was there to endorse well-developed policies.

Something like that should be put in pace again and it should be supported by an effective Policy Development Committee (either in the role of proposing ideas to National Council/Assembly or of refining those ideas further).

The mode of random branches putting forward various random motions with no strategic overview, the conference discussing them for ten minutes then generally just passing them, and then the leadership entirely ignoring them anyway is a ludicrous way for a party to establish policy and strategy.

After that, you basically just need to go through ever check and balance on the leadership which was removed and put them back in. Above all, the membership must elect a National Executive Committee to which elected officials answer. If the leadership can simply overturn the NEC the membership elected there is something fundamentally wrong.

The party also needs a serious and seriously working complaints and conflict resolution process which people actually trust. A centrally-controlled party with decay from the top down. It may make it easy for any given leader for a few years, but the damage it leaves behind isn’t worth it.

Everyone in the SNP talks about the leader; no-one really talks about the team around the leader. The party has come to believe that politics is something that is done by a brilliant leader who simply knows how to run government, how to fight elections and how to build a party.

That is not how it works at all. No-one has all those skills plus articulacy and all the other things expected of a leader. A leader is a team, not an individual. With bad advice a good leader becomes a bad leader, whereas with good coaching, scripting and preparation, a good team can make a pedestrian politician look good.

For me you need a leader with some solid intelligence because the one thing you can’t coach is the ability to think on your feet. Articulacy is part of it too. So is charisma, though people get too hung up on this. But what you really want in a leader is an understanding of the task at hand at any given moment and the ability to deliver that task by trusting and coordinating a team of people.

You need a chief of staff who has that drill-sergeant capacity to get everyone lined up, to keep everyone on the same page, to preempt the stupid little things that hit you every day. But above all you need a chief of staff who protects a leader, taking their phone away from them when that is what is needed, keeps them away from things they need not to be detained by, tells them not to worry about the little stuff because its in hand and to focus on the big stuff.

Then you want someone who is strong on political strategy to shape governmental strategy. That person needs to have a solid professional grounding in strategy – your pal who you really trust isn’t your best strategist. Then you need a trusted policy lead. This person will have a really solid grasp of public policy and how to get things done. That specifically means they will understand government and be able to control and direct civil servants. This is not just a policy-geek role.

That’s one person banging heads together and another mapping ways forward and scanning the environment for bear traps, another making sure the government programme works and can be implemented. It may sound obvious, but all of this is lacking. And you need the usual team with diary secretaries and all of that.

An optional ‘extra’ I’d always want is a trusted ally with serious negotiating skills as your envoy, calming things down, managing your networks, identifying all the little personal slights and resentments that build up in parliament, party and among stakeholders.

The rest is about your policy-specific Spad roles. You want the very, very strongest team of policy-specific experts as a team of Spads with very extensive policy-specific knowledge (a housing expert, a finance expert etc.). None of these people would be getting promoted from junior researcher. They need to have run something, to have experience, to know how systems work. And obviously you need a media manager to do the media and presentational stuff.

This might sound basic, but it isn’t the structure that’s there and none of those in post are there on real merit. None of them have run anything – it’s been a reward for loyal insiders, and the loyalty of party insiders does not get your Deposit Return Scheme right. Recruit outside the party. Do this right, do it seriously. This is the priority given the mess in government.

The SNP is woeful in terms of its HQ setup and infrastructure. It is simply miles off the pace. I’m going to describe what ‘fighting fit’ looks like here and it involves 15 to 20 people in the team. That should not be unrealistic for a party like the SNP, but given its finances right now this may need to be phased.

The first thing which is totally lacking is a serious political strategist. I know I just put a strategist in the leaders’ office but that is about government. Someone needs to be properly producing a longer-term strategy for the party and for elections.

It is quite easy to get too hung up on public attitude data, but it remains one of the most important tools you have. An in-house data analyst with solid public attitude research skills can be invaluable. You need a really good media handler, calm and authoritative. You need a lead campaign organiser who knows how modern campaigns are run (this is linked to but separate from strategy).

And of course you need a member services team and a finance team. The latter has been posted missing, as has any hint that the SNP has a fundraiser. It needs one now more than ever – firing round begging emails is not the same as effective fundraising. You need an events organiser for conferences and campaign events.

Something the SNP is also totally lacking is really good research capacity at HQ. A lot of the problems in the current SNP come from a previous leader moving the centre of power almost completely to the government set up and out of the party. The problem is that party and government are different operations with different needs and timescales.

When people talk about a ‘lack of a rebuttal unit’ (folks, that’s 20 year old patter – no-one talks about rebuttal units any more and if you web search the term almost all the recent links you’ll find are the SNP claiming to be starting one…), what they mean is that no-one at HQ is producing the solid research with which to challenge opposition claims. It’s the research which is missing, not some staffer posting wordy non-answers on social media networks.

You’ll probably need in-house legal advice but the SNP is also desperately in need of a proper, efficient complaints and conflict resolution system and this is such a problem I’d invest in that. These days I defer on advice on social media management but you need that too.

There is enormous variation in how you could configure all of this depending on your focus for the organisation, but that configuration will decide the nature of a chief executive role. If you’re ‘get the ship in order’ minded, you might be looking at a Chief Executive with solid financial management experience. If you want to make the party campaign-orientated you could have it led by a strategist/campaign organiser. If you want to be able to hold it to account more, elect a General Secretary directly by the membership.

I’ll cover this only very briefly. There is a lot of chat among people who don’t know a lot about campaigning about investing in first-rate campaign management IT systems. This is the wrong focus. There is no question that an effective piece of campaign management software is invaluable, but there are lots of them and you just buy them off the shelf.

The point is configuration, and there the point is that software just manages data. It’s absolutely all about the data. The reason the SNP is so far behind in campaigning terms is because it now has poor data, and that is because it is not collecting it via the membership. Canvas data is the thing that lets you allocate your campaign resources effectively, target your vote, get it to polling stations, find out how it is changing, what it is feeling and so on.

And canvas data is about your party, not your IT systems. That said, the SNP’s IT systems are indeed dated and in need of renewal. More to the point, the party doesn’t really seem to have people who know how to use modern IT and data. Good tools will help; blunt and dated tools will hinder. But tools don’t get tasks done, people do. Which is why I started with party reform

Finally, the SNP needs the independence monkey off its back – for now. I really want to be brutal about this; the 2026 election is simply not going to be an independence election, no matter how much anyone wants it to be. Cooking up another hair-brained indy scheme and hoping that by shouting about that the party doesn’t need to address all the fails in government is nothing more than a comforting fiction.

You can’t create a giant mess and then say ‘but I’ve got a hot air balloon we can jump in that will take us where we want to go over all the mess’, and certainly not if you’ve said it time and time again and never managed to show anyone any sign of a hot air balloon.

OK, if someone has a great one-sentence, actually-workable wheeze for how to get Scotland independent in one go in 2026 with no equivocating or potential for anyone to block that happening, I retract the above statement. But that wheeze does not exist so in its absence, accept politics as they are. The SNP is failing because it over-promised, under-delivered and made far, far too many big, avoidable mistakes.

My view is clear on this; you can run around all the other hair-brained schemes you want for as long as you want but once they all fail you’ll end up coming back and doing something very similar to what I outlined in Direction. It’s a democracy folks; it starts with building a majority, not with a shortcut which magics a majority out thin air by doing something other than engaging with voters.

At the 2031 Scottish Election it will have been 15 years since indyref. Fifteen years is widely accepted to represent ‘a generation’ (sometimes 20, but let’s not quibble). So in 2031 the ‘once in a generation’ thing is off our back too. That’s our target moment and we will get there through civic action, not parliamentary action.

Get independence out of government for now. Support and contribute fully to a civic push. Focus on public service and infrastructure for 2026 and get your act together. Explain there is a five-year plan for independence but it’s not a parliamentary plan. Focus on getting government working. Stop pretending independence is just one more SNP vote away. It won’t work and you’ll get lost.